With the introduction of the two new masteries it seems like a sorcerer class stepped away from the spotlight in the Ashes of Malmouth meta. Once glorious casters and sometimes even adventurous gunslingers sorcerers have been assigned a boring but a steady and well-payed job of molotov-throwers, whose sole responsibility is clearing Lokkar's domain while listening to his half-witted and often mistimed remarks. Everything that Sorcerer used to do you can now do better with a new mastery combo. You want Aether Ray, go spellbinder. You want to shoot some guns, go Mage Hunter. Outside of JoV's tripple devastation build which performs well but requires a lot of hard to find Monster Infrequent items (and again, is said to be outperformed by Spellbinders in that field) and good old molotov throwing there is almost nothing left to do for once glorious almighty sorcerers. Or is it?..
My old sorceress gunslinger was basically out of job. What path should I take her, I thought. Because I heard that being melee is so hard nowadays unless you want monsters dying from boredom, yawning, being totally unimpressed by another soldier/shield based adventurer crawling at them at 117% movement speed. So yes. It would make total sense to do a melee sorcerer.

Build Concept
(skip this too if you want to go straight to grimtools link and gear/skills/devotions explanation)

Survivability

Apart from having Mirror of Ereoctes on very short cooldown (less than 11 seconds) we have 3 shields (one from boots, one from Crab devotion and Blast Shield from Demolitionist mastery) and almost constant damage absorb from Phoenix devotion. We are stacking quite a bit of armor due to being able to craft 3 of our gear pieces at Angrim and having 3 heavy armor pieces, plus 10% armor modifier to Vindictive Flame from Agrivix set (up to ~2,1k armor). On top of that we have 12% Attack Damage Converted to Health (effective number is a bit less), and if we have to run, there is noone that can stop us, maximum running speed and very high trap/slow resists make sure of that. And don't forget 22% damage absorption from overcapped Maiven's Sphere of Protection.

Damage

We are stacking a metric ton of Aether damage. Because our main attack spell Callidor's Tempest has 73% weapon damage we are trying to stack as much flat Aether damage as we can plus tonns of modifiers boosting our main skill. As a support damage spells we have 16/12 transmuted Blackwater Cocktail with little electrocute flavour and 21/16 Devastation with 11 seconds cooldown. Last but not the least we have modified Vindictive Flame, Phoenix devotion proc, wisps from Agrivix set and little turrets from Attak Seru, the Mirage devotions, all stinging and debuffing mobs at melee range.

Monster debuffing

250 flat DA shred from Flashbang (plus all the confuse/impaired aim/fumble procs), -95 DA from our weapon proc, 154 flat OA shred from transmuted BWC (plus physical damage reduction), -95 OA from our weapon proc. We also have Olexra's Flash Freeze to cool some of the hotheads that can try to swarm us in Crucible. And we have Nullification, a skill that requires no introduction. And Aether Corruption (from the component) shreds mobs' attack/casting speed. In resist reduction we have -20% from weapon, -8% from Aether Corruption, -35% from Arcane Mines and 24 flat rr from Agrivix set wisps.

Decided to go cooldown reduction road to make this build Gladiator 150-170 viable. Well, it might be able to conquer it on a good day, but certain waves (like double Reaper of Souls on wave 160) are too much even for this amount of defense and 70% mirror uptime (coupled with overcapped Blast Shield). On a plus side, you can do 100-150 without buffs now (with some skill) and pretty easily with 1-2 buffs.
Core of our build is Rage of Agrivix set*. Almost every other option except pants is non-negotiable. You can use Mythical Wraithborne Legrawps if you chose Reckless Power over Star Pact, but I would recommend Mythical Legwraps of Tranquil Mind (+ 6 to our skills, slow resist and solid spirit/OA boosts). You can argue that Decree of Aldritch is a better choice but on paper it packs more aether damage but its debuffs are non-stackable with the debuffs we have from skills plus it lacks casting speed, so capping it is going to be a problem. I have tested Mindwarp and Warpfire and they are both pretty subpar to Wrath of the Ascendant.*Try to get maximum cdr everywhere, especially on the off-hand where range for this stat is 13-19%.

Skills and Devotions

Our main skill is Callidor's Tempest, thus all the gear choices with modifier to it. Everything else is built around it. We have a lot of support skills to keep monsters at bay.

Our fight usually looks like this, you should open with a flashbang and BWC for OA/DA shred and cc (and Phoenix devotion proc), cast Aether Corruption once to proc Arcane Mines, drop Devastation if mob density is high and destroy everything with CT. Or if there are no tough mobs/heroes around, you can just use flashbang + CT (like in Cronley Hideout for example).

Leveling and Attribute points distribution.

Leveling as Arcanist is pretty easy, granted skill from Searing Ember or from Flintcore bolts coupled with Olexra's Flash Freeze can take us very far (to the point where we can start equipping mythical gears).

It might not be the strongest caster build, it can certainly hold its own (like clearing Gladiator Crucible in okay time) and it is fun to play. While Spellbinders might be a bit stronger with the same set of items, it's still a great change of pace from good old BWC sorc.

Acknowledgemnts

I want to thank Crate for not only making this awesome game but for actually listening to its player base. This build became possible after a lot of players asked to fix Agrivix set (was almost unusable before 1.0.3.0) and Crate listened.

__________________Check out my builds and guides to them (all Crucible Gladiator 150-170 capable) in my profile.

I want to thank Crate for not only making this awesome game but for actually listening to its player base. This build became possible after a lot of players asked to fix Agrivix set (was almost unusable before 1.0.3.0) and Crate listened.

Things went according to the plan, wanted to showboat a bit for forums *looks away and whistles*

Honestly tho, this is why I maxed out CDR everywhere and chose Star Pact over Reckless Power. And in that particular moment I messed up a bit and panicked, should've stood my ground more to sustain thru leech. Added a new video of a snoozefest that is fight against Fabius nowadays.

__________________Check out my builds and guides to them (all Crucible Gladiator 150-170 capable) in my profile.

Some things worth considering: try to increase your ADCTH it will give you more survivability, changing weapon to decree of Aldrich will give you ~100% fire to aether conversion (you have about 75% now, gap in c speed can be filed using aethereach gloves or some other with high CS value), try to increase your OA by going SotH devo route.

What makes the Spellbinder stronger for CT? They seem very close at a glance, Demolitionist seems to offer just as much to a CT build as Necro does, maybe less raw damage, but similar defensive capability and a lot more OA.

What makes the Spellbinder stronger for CT? They seem very close at a glance, Demolitionist seems to offer just as much to a CT build as Necro does, maybe less raw damage, but similar defensive capability and a lot more OA.

What makes the Spellbinder stronger for CT? They seem very close at a glance, Demolitionist seems to offer just as much to a CT build as Necro does, maybe less raw damage, but similar defensive capability and a lot more OA.

Necro is just plain better that demo for aether arcanist.
1)Spectral binding is OPie. Lots of flat aether and some %aether and flat life and OA. I wont be surprised to see this line nerfed in near patches.
2)Spectral wrath - autocasting %RR with enough dmg to clear trash? Yes plz.
3)Decay. 25%+ dmg reduction? On top of sick devotion proc skill.
4)Mark of Torment. Another broken skill from Necro mastery. Absolutely crazy combo with Storm pact, Miror and Aeon proc.
5)Sustain from Siphon souls. And -DA on top of it. Oh, i forgot it aslo slean whole screen.
Not to mention crazy itemisation options for Spellbinders with crazy good endgame items.